"To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before . . . I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book . . . the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it." (Montaigne, Book II, Essay 10 (publ. 1580))

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

A Room With A View (E.M. Forster, 1908)


Not very good, but fortunately pretty short. I liked A Passage To India, maybe because I almost always like stories premised on different cultures coming into contact. I listened to Where Angels Fear to Tread on cassette, thought the reader did a nice job and enjoyed the story. So I was looking forward to another Forster book. Unfortunately, this one had cartoonish characters and just wasn’t very interesting. The timing is interesting – in 1908 I think big chunks of upper class or aspiring-to-upper class England still lived like it was Victorian times, though changes must have been well underway (with the remnants blown away in World War I).

Forster apparently was quite impressed with Italy; this book overlapped with some of the Italy material in Where Angels Fear to Tread.

I’m done reading Forster’s stuff.

Saturday, October 07, 2006

In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made (Norman F. Cantor, 2001)


The topic is certainly fascinating, but I didn’t like this book all that much. Cantor goes through the history of the plague, focusing on England (which has the most extensive written record). First (and deadliest) wave of plague peaked around 1350. Sounds like the plague occurred after a period of warmer weather and population growth that had resulted in placing more marginal ground under cultivation; this was reduced for literally centuries.

The plague occurred during the course of the 100 years war, making recruitment more difficult. Labor was short, peasants made some gains economically, and some even moved up socially to yeoman status.

This author thinks it was anthrax combined with bubonic plague. There was a bunch of discussion about rats spreading the disease.

The author's bio is here.

He thinks the plague contributed to the development of modern real property law – the landed gentry suffered huge losses (sometimes resulting in several dowagers taking a portion of the income). So they needed lawyers to sort things out. Author says you could thaw out a 14th century real property lawyer, give him (it would have been a him, after all) a six-month refresher course, and put him to work today. Maybe it’s true, I don’t practice in this area. My law school course on this topic was pretty archaic.

Then the author goes off on some tangents about disease. Says bubonic plague – which did hit portions of the Roman empire in the fifth century – was largely responsible for the fall of the empire. Funny, the fella writing the book mentioned immediately below must not have been aware.

This is my second book by this author (“Inventing the Middle Ages,” discussed here) and he’s dropping down the priority list. In this one, it felt like he was forcing a cause-and-effect between the plague and all sorts of things. But then again, who knows.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Bryan Ward-Parkins, 2005)


This guy was writing in response to a controversy I didn’t know existed. Apparently there are various scholars taking the position that Rome didn’t really "fall" due to "barbarian attacks." These folks wouldn’t claim that the process was entirely peaceful, but they assert that the Roman world gradually reached accommodations with Germanic folks (please don’t call them barbarians or put down their culture as compared to Rome’s) and transitioned into a different, less centralized but equally satisfactory lifestyle.

And here I had envisioned these wild Gothic types looting and pillaging and whatever (just like the cover artwork on the book), I didn’t even know an alternate view was out there.

Anyway, this author disagrees with this school of thought. He feels that the process was violent, not consensual, and ended up with a huge degradation of civilization, if more pronounced in some areas than others. All this is quite interesting, and I find his position compelling. The guy has studied lots of potsherds over the years, studied the use of tile roofs and coins, and evidence (such as it is) of the spread of writing. All this gives a pretty good picture of the extent to which some version of prosperity spread far beyond upper crust Roman society and down to the average citizen. Trade clearly was taking place all over the Roman world. After the barbarians took over, this type of evidence suggests rapid, swift disintegration (especially in the western parts of the empire).

The part about Britain was particularly interesting – because Britain was on the very edge of Roman civilization. Apparently this makes it easier to identify the influence of Roman civilization, and in turn the post-barbarian drop-off is incredibly pronounced. The author describes it as going back to the Iron Age, with a recovery period mentioned in centuries.

Something else interesting (at least to me) is that I have had some of these dates mixed up in my head. I tend to think of Rome as falling shortly after the time of Christ, when the traditional measuring date for the fall is the taking of Rome by Odoacer in 476. Roman ways no doubt survived long after that. When you think of Clovis in 511, the rapid progress of Islam via battle in the vacuum during this time, Battle of Tours in 732, Charlemagne in 800 – it really was a short leap in time between some of these developments, rather than century after century of “dark ages.”

Short, well-written, worth reading.